The digital camera has taken over for the old-fashioned film camera, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, buying a digital camera doesn’t automatically turn all your old photos into digital images. So there they sit, in their albums and at the bottom of dresser drawers, just waiting for you to rediscover them and make them part of your new, 21st-century photo collection—the one on your computer. However, many of these photos have sustained some damage during their lifetime on paper. So once you’ve scanned them, getting them in shape may require you to do some repair work. That’s what we talk about in this hour and the next one.
We start by looking at some repair techniques that you can use on black-and-white or color images. In this hour, I show you the basics of retouching; in the next hour, we’ll look at a whole range of color-related problems that don’t come up with black-and-white pictures, and we’ll try out some solutions for them. In both hours, we’ll also be looking at ways to “fix” things about an image that aren’t technically wrong, but that you don’t like, such as intrusive extra people in the background of a portrait and power lines that spoil a landscape.
Let’s start by looking at some of the things you can do to fix an old picture that’s faded, yellowed, damaged—or all three. First, we’ll examine a couple of my old family photos that need a little bit of touching up. We’ll run through the steps required to fix them and the tools you’ll need to know how to use along the way. (Remember, you can always flip back to earlier hours in the book to refresh your memory about how these tools and commands work.) Finally, we’ll start with an extremely damaged picture and work through repairing it step by step, until it looks like new again.
Some pictures don’t need very much work. The photo in Figure 21.1 has discolored over the years, and it was pretty grainy to start with. This photo could also use a little less contrast, and it needs the right half cropped away. The original is sepia tinted, but this picture would probably look just as good or better in grayscale.
To fix this picture, I first break out the Crop tool to remove the right half (check out that censor’s stamp!) and trim the bottom edge a bit. My next step is to choose Image, Adjustments, Black & White and pick a preset (I used the Red Filter) to remove the picture’s sepia color and staining; then I set the image’s color mode to Grayscale. This takes care of the color issues and also improves the contrast. Next, I use Curves (choose Image, Adjustments, Curves) to tweak the contrast a little more and lighten the image. By using Curves, I can lighten the picture’s light and medium gray tones without affecting the dark areas. In Figure 21.2, the very slight curve in the Curves dialog shows exactly how subtle this adjustment is.
In Figure 21.3, you can see the image’s improved contrast. Now you can see the difference between the texture of the hat and that of the hair, and the enhanced highlights on the face bring out the facial features. From here, the main concern is smoothing out the picture’s overall graininess and its blotchy background.
For the clean-up phase of this restoration, I started by applying the Despeckle filter, followed by a fairly heavy dose of the Dust & Scratches filter. Then I switched to the History Brush and specified the history state just before I applied the two filters so that I could paint back in the detailed, sharp original eyebrows, eyes, and lips. Finally, I decided that smoothing out the background was more trouble than it’s worth, so I selected it with the Quick Selection tool, filled the selection with 30% gray, and applied the Texturizer filter to keep the background from looking too flat. The result, shown in Figure 21.4, is much better.
Caution: To Dust or Not to Dust
Applying the Dust & Scratches filter (choose Filter, Noise, Dust & Scratches) to every scanned photo can be a big mistake because, although it does make dust particles less obvious, it also softens the focus of the picture. If you decide to try it, evaluate the results carefully. Use the Preview check box to toggle back and forth, turning the filter preview on and off until you’re certain that it’s an improvement. And if you decide that you need it for the majority of the picture, use the History Brush as I did here to restore detail where needed.
Here’s another fairly old photo, shot in 1948. This one is in much worse shape. It is both soft and contrasty, and the black tones are bluish. It has sun damage, and it’s yellowing around the edges, too. Figure 21.5 shows the untouched photo. Can we rescue it?
We’ll start by cropping the image once again, and then we’ll remove the color by choosing Image, Adjustments, Black & White. The Yellow Filter preset improves the picture’s contrast quite a bit. After the picture has been converted to grayscale, we can switch modes (choose Image, Mode, Grayscale), which, incidentally, reduces the file size quite a bit (see Figure 21.6).
Contrast is still an issue with this picture; I’d like to pull more detail out of the shadows without blowing out the highlights. A quick way to do that is to choose Image, Adjustments, Shadows/Highlights, which enables me to lighten the shadows without lightening areas of the image that are already light enough. Figure 21.7 shows the corrections so far.
Now that we can see more of the image’s details, it’s easier to tell where we need to do some touch-up work. I’m seeing a lot of dust, along with a scratch right down the baby’s face. First, I’ll try the Dust & Scratches filter (choose Filter, Noise, Dust & Scratches) to see if it can get rid of some of these flaws without softening the picture; with a Radius setting of 3, it does an acceptable job, so I can move on from there. The scratch is still there, so I’ll have to paint over it. That’s where the Eyedropper tool enters the picture (no pun intended!).
When you need to paint over part of the image, either to fill in scratches or to remove unwanted lines, spots, or relatives, you can use the Eyedropper tool to choose a color with which to paint. Switch to the Eyedropper and click on any color (or, in this case, any shade of gray) in the image that you want to replicate. That color becomes the Foreground color, which you can apply with any Painting tool. You can also press the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) key while you’re using a Painting tool to temporarily switch to the Eyedropper so that you can change colors on the fly as you paint. A pop-up menu on the Eyedropper’s Options bar gives you the choice of using a single-pixel color sample or of taking an average color from a larger sample, which can range from 3 pixels to 101 pixels square.
With the Eyedropper, Brush, and Smudge tools, we’ll repair the damage. All you need to do is to pick up the appropriate background grays from elsewhere in the picture, paint or Clone Stamp the tints in, and then smudge the area a little bit so that it blends with its surroundings. In Figure 21.8, you can see the result of these efforts.
When the area to work on is very small, I like to use a very small, very soft brush, and I set it for only 20% pressure so that my brush strokes don’t show. When you’re making corrections this small, it’s much easier to apply them gradually and let the effect build up, rather than trying to do it all in one pass and ending up with an exaggerated effect.
The Clone Stamp tool enables you to copy small pieces of a picture to locations elsewhere in the same image. It samples from a chosen point in the image, duplicating the area around that point exactly as if you had made a rubber stamp of it. Figure 21.9 shows the Clone Stamp tool and its Options bar. To use the Clone Stamp, you choose a brush shape, a blending mode, and an opacity level, as you would with any other Painting tool. Then you Option-click (Mac) or Alt-click (Windows) to specify a reference point, after which you start painting. Instead of laying down the Foreground color, you “paint” in a duplicate of the reference point’s surroundings, expanding the duplicated portion of the image as you continue to paint. In theory, you could reproduce the entire image if you had enough blank canvas.
If you click off the Aligned box in the Options bar, the stamp behaves somewhat differently. After you specify a reference point and start cloning, the duplicate portion of the image grows only while you press the mouse button. When you release it and press it again, you start creating another duplicate from the same reference point.
To specify a point from which to clone, press Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) as you click the mouse on the spot you want to copy. Then release the key and start stamping by moving the cursor to a different location and clicking or clicking and dragging. The crosshairs show the spot you’re cloning from, and the brush cursor shows where you are stamping (see Figure 21.10). A partially transparent preview of the clone, called an overlay, hovers under your cursor to help you choose exactly the right spot to click.
The Clone Source panel (choose Window, Clone Source) enables you to set multiple clone sources (up to five of them!) and switch back and forth among them. To set a new clone source, click one of the buttons at the top of the panel and proceed as you normally would with the Clone Stamp tool. Clicking any of the five buttons when the Clone Stamp tool is active switches you to that clone source.
The Clone Source panel also enables you to turn off the overlay cursor, if you find it intrusive, and back on again, as well as change its opacity and blending mode. These changes don’t affect the actual cloned pixels—only their preview in the overlay cursor. The X and Y fields in the Offset area allow you to lay down a clone a specified distance away from the cursor, and the Width and Height percentage fields can enlarge or reduce the clone as it’s created.
Note: It’s All Part of the Pattern
The Pattern Stamp tool, which occupies the same toolbox slot as the Clone Stamp tool, lets you stamp a pattern instead of cloning part of the image. To make your own pattern, use the Rectangular Marquee to select any piece of an image, and choose Edit, Define Pattern. When you use the Pattern Stamp tool, if you choose Aligned, the pattern is tiled as if you started stamping from the upper-left corner of the document, no matter where you drag. If you uncheck the Aligned box, the pattern tiles from wherever you start dragging.
When you use the Clone Stamp tool to retouch a photo, always choose a soft-edged brush in a size just slightly larger than the scratch or blemish you’re trying to hide. You’ll find that retouching is generally easier if you zoom way in on the image first.
From the very beginning, retouching has been one of the major reasons that people cite for buying and learning to use Photoshop. Recognizing this, the folks at Adobe have created some tools specifically designed to touch up your photos: the Healing Brush, the Spot Healing Brush, and the Patch tool.
The Healing Brush, whose icon looks like a Band-Aid, can be applied to any kind of spot that you want to remove, whether it’s a part of the original image or not (freckle or dust spot—it’s all the same to the Healing Brush). Instantly, the mark is gone, without affecting anything but that spot. Photoshop uses some fairly complicated math to average the texture, lighting, and shading of each group of pixels so that it can locate the ones that are out of the normal range. Those nonconforming pixels represent the offending spot, and they’re simply replaced by pixels that match the average tone and texture that Photoshop calculates “should” be there. Of course, you can heal any kind of surface with the Healing Brush, not just skin.
When using the Healing Brush, you Option-click (Alt-click) to choose a source from which to copy pixels. The big difference between the Healing Brush and the Clone Stamp is that the Clone Stamp just copies and pastes pixels from the specified location, whereas the Healing Brush also blends the replacement pixels into the original ones at the new location, making changes much less obvious. In Figure 21.11, I’ve tried to clean up the zits on the man’s cheek and neck with both the Clone Stamp, on the left, and the Healing Brush, on the right. You can judge for yourself which one looks better. The main thing you need to be careful about with the Healing Brush is that if you apply it very close to an area of a contrasting color, it will pick up extra pixels of that color and average them into the correction as well, making a darker or lighter spot where you applied the correction. You can mask contrasting areas before you start working with the Healing Brush, or you can just stick with the good old-fashioned Clone Stamp in such places.
The Spot Healing Brush is like a quick-and-dirty version of the Healing Brush—or maybe that should be quick-and-clean. Instead of defining a point from which to copy new pixels and then painting, all you do with the Spot Healing Brush is click on the spot you want to eliminate. Photoshop looks at the area around the spot, averages the colors it finds, covers the spot with the average color, and blends the repair with its surroundings—all in about half a second. For slightly larger spots, you can click and drag, but make sure that the spot you’re trying to eliminate is located in the middle of a relatively uniform area so that the tool doesn’t pull in different-colored pixels from an adjacent area.
For cleaning up larger areas, you can take advantage of the Patch tool. Like the Healing Brush tool, it matches the texture, lighting, and shading of the sampled pixels to those of the surrounding pixels in the new location. It feathers the edges of the patches you place, too, so it blends the new pixels with the old ones. To use the Patch tool, you must first decide whether the piece you select should be the source of your patch or the destination for it, and click the appropriate button on the Options bar. The tool cursor for the Patch Tool is a lasso. In Source mode, select the area you want to replace, then drag the shape you’ve lassoed over the stuff you want to replace it with, and Photoshop does the rest. In Figure 21.12, you can see how I am using the Patch tool the other way, in Destination mode, to remove the power lines visible against the sky. I’ve already done a piece on the left, and now I’ve just dragged the lassoed piece of clean blue sky over the power line on the right side. When I release the mouse button, the patch will fill in the area under the cursor.
In the following Try It Yourself section, you’ll use the Healing Brush, Spot Healing Brush, and Patch—and probably all the tricks in the book.
As you can see in Figure 21.13, this picture has been folded, faded, and generally beaten up. We’ll go through this one step by step so that you can see exactly what happens at each stage. You can download this one from the publisher’s web site and follow along. It’s called spars.jpg.
Restore a Badly Damaged Photo
To make this picture, or any other, look like new, follow these steps carefully:
Crop the image to remove the border, if there is one, and any unnecessary parts of the picture. (Anything you remove won’t have to be retouched, so you’re saving yourself a lot of work with this step.) Select the Crop tool from the toolbox. Drag it across the picture, holding down the mouse button, and then use the handles on the cropping border to fine-tune the cropping area. When you like the shape of the cropping area, double-click inside it or press Enter on the numeric keypad to crop the image.
Choose Image, Adjustments, Black & White and choose an appropriate preset to remove the colored stains and the brown tones; then choose Image, Mode, Grayscale. The Green Filter preset gives me the best contrast for this image, so I chose that and then bumped up the Blues slider to 41%, to avoid making the shadows too dark.
Open the Histogram panel. Look at the histogram to see what needs to be done to improve the picture’s contrast (see Figure 21.14). In this case, both the white and black points need to be reset. To make these changes, you’ll need to adjust the levels.
Open the Levels dialog box (choose Image, Adjustments, Levels) and adjust the levels by dragging the dark slider to the right until it’s under the point where the histogram begins to trend upward. Drag the white slider to the left until it’s under the right end of the histogram’s graph. Then drag the midpoint slider to the right a bit to lighten the medium tones in the image. Figure 21.15 shows these adjustments.
Now we’ll try the Dust & Scratches filter (choose Filters, Noise, Dust & Scratches). Because it can blur the image, using this filter is always a roll of the dice. In this case, it seems that the improvement Dust & Scratches makes outweighs the minor damage it also does. In removing the dust, it softens the details just a bit, even at a low setting, but this picture is already pretty soft, so the difference isn’t noticeable. (Figure 21.16 shows the filter applied.) Click OK to apply the filter to your own photo, or click Cancel if you don’t want to use it.
Tip: In the Background
If the image you’re working on has a clearly delineated foreground figure and a smooth or blurry background, try selecting just the background and then running the Dust & Scratches filter. Any blurring the filter does won’t matter as much on the background, and you’ll save yourself a lot of picky clean-up work.
Because the Dust & Scratches filter didn’t fix all the dust and scratches in this image, you’ll have to remove the rest of the scratches by hand. Let’s use the Healing Brush to cover them. Switch to the Healing Brush and choose Window, Brushes to open the Brushes panel. Choose a soft-edged brush. Choose Source: Sampled and make sure the Aligned box isn’t checked. Remember to set a spot to use as a source by pressing Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) while you click the mouse on the spot you want to copy. For small spots located far from object edges, try using the Spot Healing Brush with a small, hard-edged brush selection. Figure 21.17 shows the partially treated photo. Remember to change your source selection as the areas the damage runs through change value.
Because they cross right through the eyebrow, the best way to remove the creases across the face is to use the Brush tool and paint over each mark instead of trying to stamp them out. To make the task easier, enlarge the picture to at least 200%. Switch to the Zoom tool and click it in the image window to enlarge the picture, or click and drag a marquee around the area you want to focus on to zoom right to that location.
Switch to the Eyedropper tool and click the closest gray adjacent to the scratch. Switching back to the brush, choose a small brush tip and set the Opacity very low so that you can paint over the scratches, changing shades of gray with the Eyedropper as needed. Figure 21.18 shows before and after views of this step.
At the same time, you can use a combination of the Spot Healing Brush and the Smudge tool to remove any light spots or small gaps in the image.
Next, apply the Dodge and Burn tools as needed to bring out details. Dodging lightens the image, and burning darkens it. Switch to the Dodge tool, choose Shadows in the Range pop-up menu on the Options bar, and set its Exposure value to something low, such as 25%, so that the effect won’t be too extreme. Figure 21.19 shows my progress to this point.
Now all that’s left to do is to select the jacket and try a small amount of Gaussian Blur, or maybe the Surface Blur filter, to smooth out the blotches. Compare Figure 21.20 with the original photo. It’s not perfect. It’s still a very soft, grainy photo, but it’s not folded and mutilated anymore.
Tip: Toggle Trick
When you’re applying filters such as Dust & Scratches, you can instantly switch the filter preview off by clicking in the preview area. When you’re pressing the mouse button, the filter effects aren’t shown in the preview area. Release the mouse to see the filter previewed again. This technique lets you judge the effect on any particular area of the image.
Because of photographers’ varying preferences for darkroom chemicals, it was common in the early days of photography for pictures to be tinted brown, blue, or silver instead of plain old black-and-white. Sepia toning, which gave a warm reddish-brown color, was very common, and that’s the color we tend to associate most with old-time photos.
If you want to restore the original sepia tone to a picture you’ve been working on, or add a warm brown tint to a photo that didn’t start with one, Photoshop gives you several ways to accomplish this. Perhaps the easiest of these is to reset the image’s color mode to either CMYK or RGB, depending on whether the finished photo will be viewed onscreen, printed on a desktop printer, or printed commercially, and then use the Hue/Saturation dialog box (choose Image, Adjust, Hue) to add color. After you open the dialog, as shown in Figure 21.21, check both the Colorize and Preview boxes. Then drag the sliders until the image looks the way you want. Don’t overlook the Saturation and Lightness sliders; both of these values can make just as much difference in the final effect as the Hue value. Click OK when you’re satisfied with the color you’ve achieved.
A richer color with a wider range of tones can be achieved by using the Duotone color mode, which combines the grayscale image with a colored ink. Duotones are often used in commercial printing to extend the gray range of a photograph because a typical printing press is capable of reproducing only about 50 shades of gray. (Photoshop can generate 256 shades of gray.)
To create a duotone, you need to start with a grayscale image. You don’t have to convert it back to RGB or another color mode; just choose Image, Mode, Duotone. In the Duotone Options dialog box, you can also choose to incorporate three or four colors into the image to make it a tritone or a quadtone. Although duotones are usually composed of black plus a single color, as shown in Figure 21.22, there’s no reason that you can’t use two other colors instead, especially if the end result is to be displayed on a web page or as part of a desktop presentation rather than in printed form.
Create a Duotone from a Grayscale Image
If you did the last exercise, try applying a duotone to the image. Otherwise, use any photo with a wide range of gray tones. To make a duotone from a grayscale image, follow these steps:
Choose Image, Mode, Duotone to open the Duotone Options dialog box.
Choose Duotone from the Type pop-up menu in the upper-left corner of the dialog to specify that you want to use two ink colors (see Figure 21.22).
Choose colors for your duotone by clicking each of the color swatches in turn. Choose black or a dark color for Ink 1 and a lighter color for Ink 2. (Figure 21.22 shows my choices.) You have to use the Adobe Color Picker instead of the system Color Picker so that you can access the Custom colors (that is, colors from ink systems such as Pantone, Focoltone, Toyo, Trumatch, and so on). If you need to switch to the Adobe Color Picker, click Cancel and open the General Preferences dialog by pressing Command-K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows). Set the Color Picker to Adobe and click OK; then start over with step 2.
Use the curve proxies within the Duotone Options dialog box to adjust the ink distribution curves for each of your two colors. (They’re the small windows with diagonal lines labeled Ink 1 and Ink 2.) If you click one of the small curves, it expands to a full-size curve grid, which works just like the one in the Curves dialog (see Figure 21.23). Click to set points, and then drag them to adjust the curve. You can see the effect of your changes on the image as you work, and you can also monitor the change in how much color is applied to what you’re doing using the strip of tone below the curve graph.
Click OK to apply the duotone effect to the image. If you’re not satisfied with the result, choose Image, Mode, Duotone again and try a different combination. You don’t have to undo the first application; you can change the Duotone mode settings as many times as you want.
Years ago, before color film was readily available and inexpensive enough for the masses to adopt, hand-tinted photos were quite common. These were black-and-white prints painstakingly overpainted with special thinned-out paints to add pale colors to the picture. The Photoshop Brush and its Airbrush option are extraordinarily well suited to re-creating the look of a hand-colored photograph, and with the use of layers, the process is pretty much foolproof.
Tip: That ’50s Look
Using blue as the second color for a duotone, along with black, yields an image that brings to mind the look of an old black-and-white TV set. Using a light-to-medium brown with black, on the other hand gives you a fairly good imitation of old-fashioned sepia-toning, as does a combination of red and green. If you use red and green, though, be sure that you use the same curve settings for both colors; otherwise the image will have unsightly reddish or greenish areas. You may have to convert a duotone image back to RGB or CMYK mode before the image is readable by other applications.
Start by cleaning up the image that you want to hand-tint, using the techniques you’ve learned in this hour. Then change the image’s color mode to RGB. Make a new layer above the Background layer and set the new layer’s opacity to between 10% and 30%. Set the Brush opacity to 80% and paint your tints. Alternatively, leave the layer at 100% opacity, change its blending mode to color, and paint away! You’ll see a subtle difference in the effect, and it’s easier to get your color everywhere if you’re painting at 100% opacity, so you’ll probably want to try both methods to see which you prefer.
If you have large, uncomplicated areas to tint, use any of the selection tools, such as the Quick Selection tool, to select the whole area. Choose a Foreground color and choose Edit, Fill; the dialog appears so that you can choose an Opacity percentage and blending mode for the color fill. Set the Opacity to about 25%, and choose Multiply from the Blending Mode pop-up menu. Do not check Preserve Transparency; that will prevent your fill from taking effect. In the Use pop-up menu, choose Foreground Color. Then click OK to fill all the selected areas with your chosen color at that opacity and blending mode. If the color isn’t intense enough, either choose Edit, Fill and apply the fill again, or undo the Fill operation and redo it with a higher Opacity percentage. If it’s too much, undo and try again with a lower Opacity percentage. You can see my finished picture in Figure 21.24.
When you’re working with old photos, or with new photos that you want to make look old, vignetting is often the trick that makes the difference. It feathers the edges of the image’s center, usually in an oval shape, so that the portrait subject comes forward and the background fades to nothing. Here’s an easy way to create a vignette.
Draw an elliptical selection marquee around the portrait subject. Choose Select, Modify, Refine Edge and drag the Feather slider until the amount of blur around the edges looks right. Click OK, then invert the selection so that the background is selected. Finally, choose Edit, Fill and set the Use menu to white, Mode to Normal, and Opacity to 100%. Figure 21.25 shows what you see when you click OK.
In this hour, we looked at several ways that you can repair damaged or otherwise imperfect photographs. If you’re working with pictures that are old, cracked, torn, or faded, you can use a variety of Photoshop tools and techniques to cover up the imperfections and restore the image to its original glory. The Eyedropper tool enables you to specify a color or gray tone and apply it with any of the Painting tools. The Clone Stamp puts a perfect copy of a selected piece of the picture wherever you want, as much or as little as you need to cover a crack, fill in an empty space, or cover objects that you want to hide. The Healing Brush, Spot Healing Brush, and Patch tools, designed specifically for retouching, can copy the characteristics of a selection and transfer them to another location, maintaining the same lighting, texture, and other aspects of the new location so that the transplanted selection blends in perfectly. To use the Patch tool, you select an area the same way you would with the Lasso tool, whereas the Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush work like Painting tools, with brush shapes. Tinting old photos to add color can be managed in any of several ways; you can colorize a picture using the Hue/Saturation command or by turning the picture into a duotone, tritone, or quadtone. Hand-tinting can give you a very different “old” look, and vignetting adds to the effect.
Find a picture that seems in need of retouching, or download an image from this book’s page on the Sams website. Clean it up as much as you think is necessary and save a copy of the image with a new name. Then convert the copy to a duotone. Hand-tint the original using transparent tints. The duotone looks something like rotogravure pages from the 1930s, and the hand-colored version looks more like photos or postcards from the ‘40s or ‘50s. Try out these techniques with some of your own work or with scanned photos from your family archives.